The Bride is Always Late: Irish Wedding Blog from WeddingDates.ie » Weddings on a Budget

Wedding Invitations with a difference!

Ciara Crossan — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:39:05 +0000

I ment to write a blog post about Paperless Post when I first heard of it, but I was slightly dubious about whether Irish people would actually send online wedding invitations instead of the traditional card-in-an-envelope. But today, a good college buddy of mine pinged this on to me after receiving one himself. So it seems e-vitations are thriving and are here to stay.

Paperless Post is a fantastic website for those of you who want to save time collecting addresses, stuffing envelopes, licking stamps and tracking RSVPs. In their own words: “Paperless post allows you to send find stationary via email”

With their easy-to-use website, you can choose from gorgeous designs, create your personalized cards, send them all via email and then track the responses and RSVPs.

To send 150 invitations costs a mere $12.00, so not only is this good for the environment (cutting down on your carbon footprint) its good for your wallet too.

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Brides Video Blog – Episode 13: Invitations

Ciara Crossan — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 13:03:34 +0000

Liz talks us through her inspiration for her wedding invites and her own attempts to DIY, as well as the great deal she ended up getting online.

Check out a list of wedding invitation specialists here. Any other advice for brides DIYing invites or recommendations of your own – let us know in the comments!

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Wedding Sale! 10% off all weddings in Lucan Spa Hotel

Ciara Crossan — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:25:05 +0000

Sometimes we get news about offers here in WeddingDates.ie HQ that are so good we have to share with all of you!! For Dublin brides-to-be who are hunting around for great value for their wedding, you should check out the Lucan Spa Hotel.

They are currently running a Wedding Sale – 10% off all 2011 weddings booked between now and End of Feb 2011!

Their most popular package is the Platinum Wedding Package, which includes:

Champagne for the Bridal Party on Arrival
Tea, Coffee, Sandwiches & Canapés on Arrival for all Guests
Chicken & Mushroom Bouchee served in a White Wine Sauce
Bride and Grooms Choice of Soup
Roast Prime Sirloin of Irish Beef with Yorkshire Pudding & a Rich Gravy Or
Baked Fillet of Salmon with a Dressing of your Choice
Assiette of Seasonal Desserts
Tea, Coffee and After Dinner Mints

This menu usually costs €55.00 per person, but is reduced to only only €49.50 including discount!

What are you waiting for?! Go check out this 3 star Dublin Wedding Hotel now and make an enquiry to go and view the place!

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Great deal on Wedding Wines

Ciara Crossan — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 08:30:03 +0000

The lovely lads over in CuriousWines supply all of the wines to WeddingDates.ie (for official events and competitions, AND they are also our wine shop of choice for when we are off duty too!)

Anyway, Mike recently let me know about a fabulous deal they are doing that might be of interest to wedding couples out there who are looking to purchase their own wine before the big day. See, Curious Wines are moving to bigger premises, and are having a big clear out. They are now offering tiered discounts across all of their ranges for the month of June:

Spend €100 save 10%
Spend €200 save 15%
Spend €300 save 20%

Considering what most of you lot are planning on spending on your wedding wine, the savings could be considerable! So head on over to curiouswines.ie and check out their selection, or call the guys to ask for their recommendations and make sure to tell ‘em that you heard it here first! ;)

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Bridal Party & Wedding Guests – what to wear

Ciara Crossan — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:11:28 +0000

With the start of May, we are facing straight into wedding season, which for many people means they have had multiple wedding invitations through the door over the past few months and are now looking for something to wear. If you have a few weddings from the same group of friends, you probably don’t want to wear the same thing twice, so you need multiple outfits, with new shoes, handbags and accessories to match.

Shopping for one wedding can be stressful, trying to pick out the right outfit not to mind the expense that goes with it, but if you have more than one?! Bloody hell, it can all add up very quickly.

Luckily the Dundrum Town Centre, are putting on their own Wedding Experience this weekend, Saturday 8th & Sunday 9th May.

The centre is touting the event as a “must” for all brides, grooms, mother’s of the bride, bridesmaids and wedding guests. Naturally, a large shopping centre such as Dundrum offers a vast range of clothes and accessory outlets suitable for all needs, tastes and budgets, so it does make great sense for both wedding party and guests alike to check this one out!

During the weekend, there will be regular fashion shows throughout each day (Saturday 12pm, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm & 4pm / Sunday 12pm, 1pm, 2pm & 3pm) showcasing wedding guest and bridal party looks from the extensive selection of stores in Dundrum Town Centre including; Best, Chaplins, Coast, Costelloe & Costelloe, Dune, Fran & Jane, Marks & Spencer, Monsoon Accessorize, Harvey Nichols, House of Fraser, Hugo Boss, Karen Millen, Lipsy, LK Bennett, Pamela Scott and more. Toni & Guy will give guidance on wow wedding hairstyles and Chanel will provide makeup tips.

Level 1: Beauty Zone and Consultation Area – meet expert wedding planners for tips for your big day
Level 2: Fashion Show
Level 3: Wedding Displays including photographic services.

The Dundrum Town Centre Wedding Experience fashion shows will be MC’d by well known RTE presenter Laura Woods, who herself got married last year. “The Dundrum Wedding Experience will give brides and their wedding party some great tips for the big day but it will also give guests some fantastic ideas on how to pull together the perfect outfit” said Laura Woods.

If you live in the Leinster region, it would be well worth a trip to Dundrum this weekend to check out everything they have to offer for the upcoming wedding season.

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Real Wedding on a budget: Ciara & Kieran

Ciara Crossan — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 08:30:52 +0000

Next up in our Real Wedding Series, is Ciara Fitzgibbon from Cork who managed to have a budget wedding of €5,000 without sacrificing any of her big plans. I think you’ll find her story inspiring! Over to Ciara….

My husband and I got married last July, outdoors under a blue sky in sunny Cork. With many of our guests choosing to contribute towards our wedding instead of buying us extra toasters, our grand total for the day came to well under €5,000.

Our wedding ceremony, reception and photographs all testify to the fact that you no longer have to spend €20,000 to have your dream wedding. My hope in sharing our photos and story in this blog, would be that other women wouldn’t feel that the financial situation facing many of them has to put a stop to their enjoying the best day of their lives.

After eleven months of our long distance relationship between Cork and Dublin (or UCC and Trinity to be exact!) my husband Kieran proposed to me on a sunny day on Fountainstown Beach, in Cork. Soon after, we sat down and made a list of all the things that were very important to us to have for our wedding. For me it was that we could invite as many of our friends as possible and for Kieran it was that we had fantastic food and that our guests really enjoyed themselves.

Our budget was made pretty simple by the fact that we were both still college students! Our guests and especially our close friends and family contributed to various different aspects of our day instead of buying traditional gifts. We also had a huge amount of friends help us out on the day with so many different things.

All of our invitations, programmes and stationary for the day were hand made by us and designed by our friend. She was amazing when we first started to discuss the sort of style we were going for as I wanted the wedding style to be classy and timeless and to reflect our personalities. Our invitations had our silhouettes on them with handmade green paper and a small pink ribbon. The silhouettes became the motif for the day and green and pink, our colours. We also included a customised map of how to get to the venue printed on tracing paper.

My beautiful dress was bought in Pronuptia in Cork. Knowing I was on a tight budget, this is one area where I expected to have to compromise. With my best friend and bridesmaid, Sarah, in tow, I tried on a beautiful strapless lace dress which was so wildly beyond my budget that it was almost embarrassing just to be standing in it. You can only imagine our faces when the sales assistant told us that it was originally €2,500 but that the shop was closing down and they were selling the dress off the rails for €500! The dress was dry cleaned at no extra cost and even came down in price again to €300 before two of my best friends told me that they wanted to buy it for me. Many bridal shops sell dresses for up to half price when bought off the rails. This is a great way to save money but still get your dream dress.

I saw the duchess satin dresses on sale in Coast and immediately knew they were perfect for my two bridesmaids! The green was exactly the shade I wanted and the satin tied in nicely with the champagne satin bands on my dress. These too were a bargain, reduced from €290 to €115. I bought them a year before the wedding in the summer sales and even though I thought it might be a bit early I was amazed to find that they were back in the shop the following summer, and at full price! These too were a wedding gift from one of my aunts who wanted to contribute towards the big day instead of buying us a kettle!

Another area where we saved money were our rings. After going back to the shop where my engagement ring was bought, we decided to shop around. We went into small family owned jewellery shops and after quoting our best price to a few different jewellers, we managed to get €400 off the original price we were given! One shop owner even asked us, “Did Eddie Hobbs send ye?!”.

With 180+ guests we knew that holding our reception in a hotel was well beyond our budget and we began to look at alternative venues. The Ardfallen Centre in Douglas was perfect for what we needed. Set in lovely grounds the centre has a church, rose garden and a couple of large halls. We decided to have our ceremony outside beside the rose garden under a large tree on the lawn. We decorated the tree with paper lanterns and satin ribbons and a friend of ours who is an artist kindly made a ‘chuppah’ type structure for us to say our vows under. We wrote our own vows and planned a ceremony that reflected our desire to put God first in our marriage. Kieran and I are both Christians and attend a local Church called Grace Christian Fellowship. As well as our vows we sang worship songs and had our friends pray with us. It was very informal and over within half an hour, short and sweet!

After the ceremony we went on our own with our amazing photographer Tamryn Kerswell to do our photos. After working in the Lewis Glucksman Art Gallery in UCC for many years, I knew straightaway that it was where I wanted our slightly alternative wedding portraits to be taken. We were greeted with chocolates and champagne and lots of smiles. The gallery is available for hire for photo shoots and much more. Getting our photos taken in the gallery was one of our favourite parts of the day as we took two hours out to let it all sink in. For more information, email info@glucksman.org.

Tamryn was fantastic! She was so easy to work with and really open to trying different things. She kept cool and calm the whole day and I would work with her again in a heart beat given the chance! Her photography website is www.kwatamphotography.com, it’s well worth a look. She also came over to take a few photos of us getting ready that morning and smiled and laughed the whole time!

When we saw our photos we were ecstatic. I couldn’t have been happier with the mix of posed and candid shots. She made everything look fantastic and really captured the atmosphere that was felt on the day. So many people have complimented them that I have honestly lost count! Tamryn’s photography is personal and there is something very unique about her photography. I’m so glad she could be there on the day.

The reception hall in Ardfallen had been decorated by us the day before and looked amazing! We covered the ceiling with organza and tulle that had been bought on sale and used pews that were already in the hall for the top table. The centre pieces were simply branches with pearls and beads hanging from them, set in black glass vases bought in tesco! To create a focal point in the massive hall we placed two huge silhouettes above the top table and hung lanterns and white fairy lights around the edges of the hall.

For our first dance we had over 200 tea light candles in glass yoghurt jars places in a circle around us as we danced to Lou Reid’s ‘Perfect Day’. The yoghurt jars had been collected from over the past year by all of our yoghurt eating friends!

Instead of just the traditional Irish fruit cake we had 200 cupcakes with a fruit cake on top! Our amazing friend Rachel made all of the cupcakes and decorated them for us as a wedding gift. The cupcakes came in three different flavours and looked amazing. We served these after the dessert and I couldn’t count the amount of compliments we received! The fruit cake made by Kieran’s family topped the whole thing off and was delicious.

The most, and possibly only, stressful thing to organise was the food for the day. We had designed a menu of BBQ’d food and buffet with a chef but unfortunately three weeks before the wedding he had to pull out due to reasons beyond his control. With very little time left to find a replacement, one of my very good friends Nadine offered to organise the food. It was absolutely a community effort with about 10 people making different dishes after Nadine dropped them the ingredients and sometimes even the recipes! She also designed the layout for the day and made sure everything was where it was meant to be. We finally found another chef who is also a friend to step in on the day to oversee the food, several others to serve it and even one to make sure that everything was moving smoothly.

We are so blessed with a great community and it is something that all of our out of town guests remarked on. Without all these helping friends the perfect day that we enjoyed simply wouldn’t have been possible. Our wedding was full of love and lots of great friends and it all made for a day that none of us would ever forget!

Would YOU like to share your real wedding story with the weddingdates.ie blog readers?! Send us in some photos and your wedding story and we would love to publish it! Contact Us here.

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One woman’s trash is another woman’s treasure!

Ciara Crossan — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 10:16:00 +0000

Buy My Dress is Ireland’s largest one-day charity dress sale.With same-day events happening in Dublin (Royal College of Physicians, D 2), Cork (Cork School of Music, Union Quay) and Galway (Meyrick Hotel, Eyre Square) on Thursday 20th May this is definitely one event not to be missed! There might even be some second hand wedding dresses up for grabs, or options for bridesmaids dresses – so well worth going along if you are a B2B.

Ladies all over the country are spring cleaning their closets and donating lightly-used dresses which they no longer wear to this fashion event! C’mon, admit it…we all have then, a dress or two lurking at the back of the wardrobe that we have never (and will never!) wear! Whether too big, too small, or simply an impulse purchase gone wrong, Buy My Dress wants that dress you once wore to a wedding, or bought for your child’s communion and is now at the back of your closet.

Last year was the first Buy My Dress Event and they sold almost 1,500 dresses in Dublin’s Royal College of Physicians, raising 35k and earning the title of Fundraising Campaign of the Year. This year the charity hopes to collect 5,000 dresses and has expanded to other cities Cork and Galway.

If you are interested in donating a dress, then you can check out the drop off points at www.buymydress.ie (Peter Mark Salons and many Credit Unions are participating as drop off locations)

As a result of monies raised through last years Buy My Dress event they have begun funding the post of Ireland’s first Down Syndrome Liaison Nurse to AMNCH, Tallaght. In this role, the nurse provides advice, support and guidance to parents of newborn children with Down Syndrome in Dublin maternity hospitals and at home on request. The aim for 2010 is to expand this post and fund further Liaison Nurses countrywide.

So, either donate a dress or head along on the 20th May to one of the shopping days in Dublin, Cork or Galway and buy a dress! As they say, one womans trash is another womans treasure!

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Bag a Bridal Bargain!

Ciara Crossan — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:30:32 +0000

OxfamBridal is calling all brides-to-be and fashionistas to a fun filled bridal fashion show in Dublin’s Fallon & Byrne on the 25th February to showcase the fantastic range of wedding dresses on sale in OxfamBridal-Oxfam’s dedicated bridal boutique.

The dress designers on show include Vera Wang, Rosetta Nicolini and Amanda Wyatt. Almost all the dresses on show have never been worn before. RTE’s Off the Rails stylist Brendan Courtney is the host on the night and there will be a performance by the Dublin Gospel Choir. Other fashion highlights include a showcase of vintage clothes also on sale in Oxfam’s Georges Street shop. Tickets cost €10 and are available by calling 01 4780777, or dropping into Oxfam George’s Street shop, Dublin 2.

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Wedding Place Cards – Unique ideas to impress your guests!

Ciara Crossan — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:37:41 +0000

Weddings are a momentous occasion to be cherished for a lifetime. Putting unique touches small or large can help make the most of those memories. One way to personalize your wedding is by creating bespoke place cards that guests can appreciate and take home. It’s also a great fun task that you can DIY and not have to spend a fortune on. You don’t have to go all out, or use place cards that are ill-fitted to your wedding. The whole purpose of personalizing your name cards is to make them unique and represent your style, and it’s great to be able to put a bit of your own personality into every aspect of your wedding.

For the full post with practical ideas, you can read it on the Confetti blog

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Top 10 Tips on Selecting your Wedding Flowers

Ciara Crossan — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:49:15 +0000

These Top 10 Tips come from UK based online florists - http://flowersguide.co.uk

Flowers take centre stage and play an integral part of your wedding day. They make up your bouquet and that of the bridesmaids, they are scattered by the flower girls, worn as button holes by the grooms men and guests, form centrepiece decorations at the church and venue, can be thrown as confetti and used to create a sense of continuity and style between outfits, event and theme. Getting your flowers right and getting them within budget will provide you with a great sense of relief. The task may seem momentous and indeed it is! However, you may find that these top ten tips on selecting wedding flowers help!

Photo Courtesy of www.bunches.co.uk

Tip One – Plan in advance. It is never too soon to start looking for a wedding florist, so once you have set the date for the big day, get those Yellow Pages out! A wedding florist will have to do much of the work on the morning of your wedding, so may only be able to fit in one or two weddings per weekend – book early to avoid disappointment.

Tip Two – Shop around. To ensure you get the best deal, both financially and in terms of the best florist you can possible have – shop around. Get quotes from various florists and do not be afraid to ask to see pictures. A professional wedding florist should be more than happy for you to pop in when they are doing someone else`s wedding so you can view their work. As you no doubt will tell everyone and anyone you are getting married, take heed of word of mouth recommendations! A great wedding florist is certainly something to cherish, so if your friends can recommend one – all the better!

Tip Three – Stay within budget! Selecting wedding flowers may come down to cost at the end of the day, but this does not mean you will have to compromise on what you want. Get a great florist who can work with you and find the perfect arrangements for you. Be open at the beginning about your budget – remember wedding flowers can cost anything from three hundred to five hundred pounds (and a great deal more or less!). Remember – if budget is an issue avoid holidays, especially ones which revolve around flowers, such as Valentines day and Mothers Day! Florists will be busier and charge more during these periods!

Tip Four – Consider the season when choosing the colour. Not all flowers will be in season at the time of your wedding, so consider this when choosing the colour of flower for your wedding theme. Knowing your colour before you go to the florist will be a great help!

Tip Five – Remember time is money! Choosing an intricate bouquet will push the cost of your bouquet up. Also, bouquets can be heavy! Choose flowers that are in season to cut costs. Lastly, consider a single flower for a dramatic look!

Tip Six and Tip Seven – Consider combinations and multiple uses! Flowers from the venue (i.e. the church) can be used as flowers for the table settings! Multiple use can cut costs and provide continuity.

Tip Eight – Co-ordination is everything! When it comes to the bridesmaids and grooms men`s button holes, flowers are the ideal way to co-ordinate your wedding day. Remember, wedding photos will be taken of the whole group, so make sure everyone looks good together.

Tip Nine – When it comes to Confetti, natural is best! Freeze dried petals have recently become the hottest property when it comes to choosing confetti. Better for the environment, natural flower petal confetti is an ideal way to add glamour and sophistication to your wedding whilst being in touch with nature. Available in an array of different flower petals (and therefore in a vast array of colours) petal confetti adds a modern twist to an old tradition.

Tip Ten – Consider buying your wedding flowers online for convenience and budget. You may find that by purchasing your wedding flowers online you save money and find the whole process less stressful. Remember, if your flowers are delivered in water to ensure you dry the stems before holding up in front of your dress!

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